[gentoo-user] Gentoo VMWare image works on Intel but not AMD. Are they not interchangeable?

[gentoo-user] Gentoo VMWare image works on Intel but not AMD. Are they not interchangeable?

[Daevid Vincent]

I have a VMWare Workstation image of Gentoo Linux that I transfer between my
desktop and my notebook (for LAMP/Ruby development) and it works fantastic
on both. Both are running WindowsXP as the host VMWare. Both are Pentium4.

Recently, I tried to share the image with a co-worker and it pukes out about
the time it does some udev stuff at the top of starting up. The (rc.init ?)
scripts start breaking and spewing lots of errors and ultimately doesn't
mount the filesystem properly. We are able to manually mount it later, but
then lost of other things are broken. VMware doesn't have any errors we
could find, not even in the logs. It seems to be an OS issue. 

Does the host CPU make a difference? I thought it was all emulated? I tried
to recompile the kernel with the generic '386 CPU settings and removed all
power mgmt etc, and the same issue happens. 

Can I not transfer between Intel and AMD CPUs? Is there some magic thing in
the kernel I need to set so it can work on both?

We attempted several times and tried using VMWare player and also VMWare
workstation.

It would really suck to have to have him re-compile everything just to get
the same dev environment setup as mine.

I also posted this on the VMWare forums in case anyone cares:
http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=71079

-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo VMWare image works on Intel but not AMD. Are they not interchangeable?

[Alan McKinnon]

On Tuesday 06 February 2007, Andrey Gerasimenko wrote:
> On Tue, 06 Feb 2007 10:27:01 +0300, Alan McKinnon
>
> <alan@linuxholdings.co.za> wrote:
> > ....
> >
> >> Does the host CPU make a difference? I thought it was all
> >> emulated? I tried to recompile the kernel with the generic '386
> >> CPU settings and removed all power mgmt etc, and the same issue
> >> happens.
> >
> > The host CPU shouldn't make a difference as a VMWare .vmx is
> > supposed to work the same on all hosts. However, the VMWare version
> > in use on your friend's machine might be broken on AMD, or he has
> > done something dumb.
>
> No, it does make difference. The guest OS uses the same CPU as the
> host, with the exception of the number of available cores. If there
> are 2 or more cores on the host, including virtual ones through
> multithreading, the guest may use 1 or 2 cores. If the host has only
> one core, the guest must be configured to use only one.


Ah, this does make sense.

Daevid, you say you use a P4,a nd your friend is AMD. Does he perhaps 
have an AMD64 or AMD dual core machine?

alan

-- 
Optimists say the glass is half full,
Pessimists say the glass is half empty,
Developers say wtf is the glass twice as big as it needs to be?

Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo VMWare image works on Intel but not AMD. Are they not interchangeable?

[Jason Weisberger]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2242 bytes --]

Daevid,

If your Gentoo installation was compiled with march=p4 or the like, your
image will not work on an AMD machine.  The way to have them interchangeable
is to use march=i686 mtune=p4, that way there are no cpu-specific
instructions compiled into your binaries.  mtune will just adjust the
scheduling to fit the pipeline of your most used arch.  The one piece of
hardware that cannot be virtualized on an x86 machine is unfortunately the
cpu, unless of course you're running a new cpu with Intel Virtualization or
AMD's Pacifica.  Even then, it can't deal with incompatible binaries.
You'll not just have to recompile your kernel, but your entire system with
the new cflags for it to work interchangeably.

Jason Weisberger

On 2/5/07, Daevid Vincent <daevid@daevid.com> wrote:
>
> I have a VMWare Workstation image of Gentoo Linux that I transfer between
> my
> desktop and my notebook (for LAMP/Ruby development) and it works fantastic
> on both. Both are running WindowsXP as the host VMWare. Both are Pentium4.
>
>
> Recently, I tried to share the image with a co-worker and it pukes out
> about
> the time it does some udev stuff at the top of starting up. The (rc.init?)
> scripts start breaking and spewing lots of errors and ultimately doesn't
> mount the filesystem properly. We are able to manually mount it later, but
> then lost of other things are broken. VMware doesn't have any errors we
> could find, not even in the logs. It seems to be an OS issue.
>
> Does the host CPU make a difference? I thought it was all emulated? I
> tried
> to recompile the kernel with the generic '386 CPU settings and removed all
> power mgmt etc, and the same issue happens.
>
> Can I not transfer between Intel and AMD CPUs? Is there some magic thing
> in
> the kernel I need to set so it can work on both?
>
> We attempted several times and tried using VMWare player and also VMWare
> workstation.
>
> It would really suck to have to have him re-compile everything just to get
>
> the same dev environment setup as mine.
>
> I also posted this on the VMWare forums in case anyone cares:
> http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=71079
>
> --
> gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
>
>


-- 
Jason Weisberger
jbdubbs@gmail.com

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 3080 bytes --]